Collapse intersecting regions

Question

I am trying to find a way to collapse rows with intersecting ranges, denoted by \"start\" and \"stop\" columns, and record the collapsed values into new columns. For example

Answer 1

After sorting the data, you can easily test if an interval overlaps the previous one, and assign a label to each set of overlapping intervals. Once you have those labels, you can use ddply to aggregate the data.

d <- data.frame(
  chrom = c(1,1,1,14,16,16), 
  name  = c("a","b","c","d","e","f"), 
  start = as.numeric(c(70001,70203,70060, 40004, 50000872, 50000872)), 
  stop  = as.numeric(c(71200,80001,71051, 42004, 50000890, 51000952))
)

# Make sure the data is sorted
d <- d[ order(d$start), ]

# Check if a record should be linked with the previous
d$previous_stop <- c(NA, d$stop[-nrow(d)])
d$previous_stop <- cummax(ifelse(is.na(d$previous_stop),0,d$previous_stop))
d$new_group <- is.na(d$previous_stop) | d$start >= d$previous_stop

# The number of the current group of records is the number of times we have switched to a new group
d$group <- cumsum( d$new_group )

# We can now aggregate the data
library(plyr)
ddply( 
  d, "group", summarize, 
  start=min(start), stop=max(stop), name=paste(name,collapse=",")
)
#   group    start     stop    name
# 1     1        0    80001 a,d,c,b
# 2     2 50000872 51000952     e,f

But this ignores the chrom column: to account for it, you can do the same thing for each chromosome, separately.

d <- d[ order(d$chrom, d$start), ]
d <- ddply( d, "chrom", function(u) { 
  x <- c(NA, u$stop[-nrow(u)])
  y <- ifelse( is.na(x), 0, x )
  y <- cummax(y)
  y[ is.na(x) ] <- NA
  u$previous_stop <- y
  u
} )
d$new_group <- is.na(d$previous_stop) | d$start >= d$previous_stop
d$group <- cumsum( d$new_group )
ddply( 
  d, .(chrom,group), summarize, 
  start=min(start), stop=max(stop), name=paste(name,collapse=",")
)
#   chrom group    start     stop  name
# 1     1     1        0    80001 a,c,b
# 2    14     2    40004    42004     d
# 3    16     3 50000872 51000952   e,f